With the rapid growth of online shopping markets in modern society, there is high possibility that actual personal information of merchandise recipients will be leaked by online sellers who sell merchandise to be ordered by customers, such as home shopping malls or Internet shopping malls, and business partners who receive the actual personal information of the merchandise recipients from the online sellers in order to deliver the merchandise.
In addition, the responsibility of the online sellers and the business partners who deliver merchandise has become greater as the result of strengthening individual information protection laws for protecting individual information, such as personal information of customers.
In order to solve the above problems, technologies that enable a plurality of business partners to deliver merchandise without storing actual personal information of recipients in a processing system possessed by the business partners have been developed.
Systems adopting these technologies are shown in FIG. 1. For example, as is simply shown in FIG. 1, a first type of scheme is configured such that respective Internet shopping malls A and B (11 and 12) have their own confidential delivery waybill output systems and business partner 1 (13) who delivers merchandise accesses a corresponding one of the confidential delivery waybill output systems in order to output a confidential delivery waybill for customer order information of a customer, e.g. orderer a (10) (see FIG. 1(A)), and a second type of scheme is configured to include an independent hub system 30 capable of receiving personal information of recipients from a plurality of Internet shopping malls X and Y (21 and 22) in order to output delivery waybills such that business partner 2 (23) who delivers merchandise accesses the hub system in order to output a confidential delivery waybill for customer order information of a customer, e.g. orderer b (20) (see FIG. 1(B)).
In the first type of scheme or the second type of scheme, however, the actual personal information of a recipient must be input in every online shopping mall at the time of ordering merchandise, which is inconvenient, and the personal information of the recipient, input at the time of ordering merchandise, is stored in the respective shopping malls or in the hub system, whereby individual information may be leaked in large quantities, and delivery waybills may be illegally issued.
Therefore, there is urgent necessity for a scheme that is capable of preventing the leakage of actual personal information of recipients in large quantities through the provision of an independent personal information managing system that is capable of overcoming the inconveniences of a customer inputting personal information, such as a name, telephone, and address, as shipping destination information in every online shopping mall or for every order at the time of ordering merchandise, preventing actual personal information of a recipient from being stored in the online shopping mall, and preventing the actual personal information of the recipient, input every time, from being repeatedly stored in the hub system, and a confidential delivery waybill issuing system that is capable of confirming a customer order number provided by an online shopping mall system when a confidential delivery waybill is output using virtual personal information, whereby it is possible to prevent illegal issuance of the delivery waybill.